While online gambling has been available for many years, it has only been legal in Spain since 2011. When Spain legalized online gambling, gamblers were only allowed to gamble on regulated online casinos that could be identified by having a “dot-es” domain.
While the goal was to make regulated online casinos easy to identify, a recent study conducted by the CODERE Foundation in Madrid indicates that 43% of online poker players in the country continue to play on non-regulated (aka. non-dot-es) websites.
The reasons for this are many. Some gamblers are simply unaware that they are playing on unregulated online casinos, but 12.7% state that they play exclusively on unregulated online poker sites. This is either because they prefer the casinos, have been gambling on them for many years, or dislike online gambling to be regulated in anyway.
As far as demographics go, Spain’s online gamblers tend to be more mature in age. While it seems as if online gambling took a bit of a decline last year of just over 1%, the number of illegal gamblers are not taken into account. It is impossible to tell if the number is really on the decline, or if online gamblers are simply spending more time on unregulated casinos.
Some argue that there is nothing wrong with the unregulated casinos they continue to play on, because they have never had a negative experience. Gamblers are advised that they have no protection if they take an unverified loss with an unregulated casino.
Spain is not the only country that struggles with unregulated casinos, but they have one of the highest consumer adoption rates of unregulated casino patrons.
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